


habituals

by hopeheavy



Category: Mystic Messenger (Video Game)
Genre: Abuse, Depression, Eye Trauma, F/M, Minor Violence, Spoilers, Suicide Idealization
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-05
Updated: 2016-09-05
Packaged: 2018-08-13 02:55:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7959610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hopeheavy/pseuds/hopeheavy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I feel so twisted inside.”</p><p>Something coils serpentine at the pit of his stomach, dark and writhing.</p><p>Her face drags against his shirt, and then she’s looking up at him, her eyes wide and oddly bright, her smile stretching. Her fingers dig deeper.</p><p>“Do you feel twisted too?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	habituals

**Author's Note:**

> a little application/character exploration i did on v of mystic messenger! he really stuck with me from the very beginning (before i even knew you weren't allowed to date him... you can imagine how disappointed i was) and i was just really enamored with his character and his relationship with rika in particular. this might be a little off/out of order and i kind of ran with the dialogue from memory because i didn't have time to replay it, but i hope you enjoy it anyway! 
> 
> if you care about spoilers and haven't played seven's route / secret ending 01 i'd steer clear!

No one calls him the best, but they do say that money talks.

This is far from the first time V’s pieces have had their own exposition, neatly showcased on plain white walls under a flood of fluorescence, and the nerves have long since settled. He doesn’t mind the throngs of people, but he tends to stay to corners, edges - the questions seem to cycle after a while, and as much as he appreciates the enthusiasm, V has never been particularly comfortable with lengthy spans of overt attention.

There’s a reason that, even as well as his work sells, as consistently as it draws crowds, he remains very much under the public radar.

But he can’t help the way his eyes catch one girl in particular; a lithe thing, her dress swaying about her knees, a rush of blonde hair. For what must be nearly a full day he sees her hovering, all clasped hands and tiptoes - an hour into the second he decides to see what she’s so enthralled by.

She's standing in front of one photo, a simple thing, flower with unfurled petals; says it reminds her of love, of the sun - he can't look away when she speaks.

"This consistent love and warmth, I feel it from all your pieces. When I stare at your photographs, I feel all my fears disappear! Do you think that world will ever come? A world where all fears are gone and filled with love and warmth, just like when I see your photographs? Do you believe we all can become the sun one day? Is that what you think when you take these photos?"

"…No, I don’t have such profound thoughts when taking the photos. I'm not that great. But when I take them, I do hope… That people like you can feel love when looking at them."

"You are great, V, just because you can take photographs like this."

"Thank you..." He looks at her for a long moment. "Do you want it?"

His works sell well; they’re his only source of income, after all, and she predictably balks at the idea of taking something so expensive for free.

V says: So buy me coffee after the expo and we’ll call it even, and she agrees.

They shake hands. She says her name is Rika; her fingers are so slim, so small.

She turns to go, but before she’s made it to the door, she whirls around. Her arm juts into the air with almost childish abandon, her smile similarly beatific - and she waves goodbye.

He watches Rika leave and thinks he sees the sun she’d spoken of.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

He’s never been holy before her.

And even now, he wouldn’t venture such a thought; V, groundless, a scavenging thing, seeking salvation at the base of a girl with pools of golden hair, celestial smile. The choir sings hymns and he hums along, he prays beside Rika and shapes the words lovingly and can never say for sure it isn’t her he’s pleading to.

These are the things he will scarcely admit, even to himself.

How hungered he’s become, how absolutely insatiable, when each modicum of information she gives away only opens another gateway of questions, of needs.

He tells her: You’re beautiful. You’re fascinating. I want to understand you.

She turns on him and he thinks it divine.

“ _Why?_ ”

(Their days spin endlessly this way, with V’s fingers spindled almost desperate, edging towards desolate, that frenzied need to gain leverage he can never seem to grasp. And Rika dangling ever over a precipice, holding herself aloft, but ready to freefall at any moment. She teases him with the thought, speaks it like a lover with curled lips, hazed eyes. I don’t want to be alive, she’ll say. I don’t think I’ll be here much longer, she’ll say. If you’re smart you’ll just leave me alone, she’ll say. What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with me?

He wonders, sometimes, if she knows how much that ropes him in further. In this, he chose his shackles well. At least they keep him grounded.)

V goes to church with her and opens himself to the praises they sing and tries to feel it as deeply as he feels her. It becomes comfortably routine, the clothes, the pews, the smiles, the chants. There is a long while where he seems suspended in empty space, rotating along a singular axis, a track stuck stuttering on repeat.

One day he catches sight of a head of red hair - it would be hard to miss amongst the usual crowd - and is all the more surprised when he sees who it belongs to. Whisp of a boy, thin arms and weak knees, his face dirt-smudged. Radiating something ultimately morose.

And V cannot help but to befriend him over the weeks, to reach out at every opportunity, if only to lend a smile, a spare word of kindness, things he thinks he might need. As time passes, Saeyoung opens up enough about his situation that V’s gentle concern gives way to upended disquiet.

So he brings Rika into the fold and they pull some strings.

Saeyoung becomes Luciel, and V leads the way to his new life.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

She says she wants to help people. She says she wants to do what no one’s done before. Opens her mouth impossibly wide and spits out visions of a beautiful future. V aches with want to be a part of it.

He gives her the funds to get started, and together they bring RFA to fruition.

(Rika’s Fundraising Association. It was always meant to be her’s. That was what she wanted.)

V brings Luciel along without much effort, who proves an invaluable addition thanks to his proficiency in code. The members slowly grow - with Hyun, with Jumin and his assistant - and for a while, they do what the RFA set out to do. The throw parties - Rika wheels and deals with ease, gathering guests from all walks of life, and each party flourishes. They gather incredible funds each time, all given to various charities, and their notoriety gradually spikes.

He begins to feel, with surprising, languid ease, a sense of family.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

“Thanks to you, I've opened my eyes to a new world. If we really want to be happy... We have to quit our own existence. That's when we become truly pure.”

He shudders in the dark and knows she feels it.

Rika sidles up to him, a vision in moonlit white, so soft and graceful V’s certain that, were he to try and reach out, to brush against her skin, he would find only static space. A charge of electricity and nothing more.

He has always been enamored by the world and all its fillings, the breadth of its valleys, the scope of its mountains. The gentility of a single flower’s petals. And, since her, the sun. Always the sun.

Only now has he begun to consider its emptiness.

And she is sweetness personified, the doe eyes, the wide-fringed lashes, the pouting lips. When V looks at her he isn’t concerned with anything at all; she might gnash him into pieces, eat him whole, and not a single thought would cross his mind.

Rika presses into his shoulder in that way that tells him she wants to be held; he wraps his arms around her - she’s so _small_ , the sleeves all but swallow her up - and smiles into her hair. In his embrace, he feels Rika unwind, her breath accumulates warm at the center of his chest where her nose presses; she trails her fingers up his spine like each bone contains a private thought. Her index presses gently at each ridge.

“I feel so twisted inside.”

Something coils serpentine at the pit of his stomach, dark and writhing.

Her face drags against his shirt, and then she’s looking up at him, her eyes wide and oddly bright, her smile stretching. Her fingers dig deeper.

“Do you feel twisted too?”

He wants to say _No,_ to say _Please stop saying things like this,_ to say _Would it matter if I did?_

V pushes a hand through her hair, the blonde waves, he breathes long and low and tries to imagine the smile she gives him is something genuine. Once it had bloomed so bright, impossibly so - how long had it taken him to fall for the way her features turned upwards, for the way her laughter had pealed? - but now it is always edged. Just enough to unsettle.

But not enough to shake him.

There is no answer that will take the sting from her smile. He kisses her instead and wishes it were enough.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

Those hands. The thin, elegant fingers. Brittle split nails. He imagines them picking him apart before they so much as twitch.

Her voice slings heavy in the space between them, like it might bridge whatever gap has been growing, festering rotten in the silence.

Quietly, like the prayers she mutters at night: “V.”

Rika strikes with all the decidedness and intensity of a cornered animal, flashing nails, a show of white teeth. He’s aware of the jolting darkness, first, the slashes in vision that distort her pretty face. Makes her smile leer. Her tears well and he can only tell when they drip lazily onto his cheek.

He’s on the ground, he realizes.

And that’s when it hits him: burning, searing - as though she’s reached in and torn his eyes from his skull, or else ripped them to fine shreds. V covers them with his hands, notes the wetness there - he can’t be sure if it’s blood or tears.

He says: “Rika.”

She screams and the sound is cutting.

“You promised me! You said you’d love me no matter what I did to you, remember?”

Slim fingers find purchase on his shoulder and dig in and he can hardly notice the pressure. V feels her lips brush his skin, followed by her breath, soft and telltale beside his ear; it hitches, near-hysterical. He almost says her name again but his mouth refuses to move. “So prove it. Won’t you? Won’t you save me, V?”

He lowers his hands; the light hits him like a visible screech, but not so much as the blurred image of Rika’s tear-streaked face.

V places a hand against her jaw, ghosts across it, and starts when he leaves the skin red.

“I will.” Is his reply.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

She’s got a mind full of dreams, of larger-than-life desires. If he could see what she was thinking, he’s sure it would manifest in sunlit stretches, bright clouds only beginning to turn gray.

He’s watched her grow dark, over the years. Watched her eyes grow glassy, her smile sprout teeth that unnerve.

But she doesn’t frighten him; even now, when she appears before him a blurred figure, Rika behind a watercolor screen, he doesn’t fear her. He doesn’t mind the blankness of his eyes, the way every day the edges fade little by little. One day, he knows, he won’t be able to see a thing. And he doesn’t mind. As he’d promised her once, he’d take any sort of abuse at her hands, if only to let her know, beyond a doubt, that he will never waver.

She speaks of death and absolution and immortality, of a future where no one suffers. Sadness is a foreign concept. No one dies.

(He can’t see her clearly enough, but he imagines the way her eyes get further away each time. Rika dreams in eternities. V dreams in only her. He can’t understand when she curses the RFA, when she pushes him away.

“It’s useless,” She’ll say. “You’re useless.”

And who is he to argue?)

She has new visions, built up and slung haphazard with the same sweet reverence that she’d given to the RFA. V sees it shaped into something wrong, at odds with the girl he’d first met and the way her smile had absolved him of any worries.

Rika is hardly a shadow of that person, but even so, he’d strung up a promise in the slats of his ribcage, felt it thrum in time with his pulse. That sort of thing is impossible to discard.

And even if he could, he wouldn’t want to.

Rika constructs plans, spends nights bent over a notebook, scratching away at the pages. V will pass by her, brush a hand along the top of her head or the length of her arm.

She shows him when she’s done. Blistering smile, searing at the edges.

(This is how he imagines it. In his eyes she is a hazy form, impossibly beautiful, impossible to make out clearly.)

He can’t quite decipher the words, so she reads it out for him: Mint Eye.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

He begins the process of building a merciful lie.

To the members of RFA, Rika is dead. Taken from this world by her own hand. It makes sense, doesn’t it? She struggled, didn’t she? Only V, her fiance, the love of her life, would know such intimate details about her, isn’t that true?

He excuses himself shortly after he delivers the news. He cannot take the questions, not at first. He certainly can’t take the grief.

V mourns in his own way, cloaked in nightfall, living on his knees in front of her.

She always sends him away, careless wave of her hand. Those pretty fingers. Back to his apartment, which grows more empty and desolate by the way, where he whiles away the hours until his ruined eyes burn too harshly to stay open any longer.

When he sleeps he dreams of Rika, and of the sun.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

He tells them he’s traveling. Taking photographs, and all that. He reads back in the logs when he can, tries to mimic that sense of family that had once made him feel so whole.

Still, he is separate. There’s no getting around that.

And that’s his own fault: he’s wrapped up in secrets he cannot reveal, secrets that have long since grown teeth and taken to biting. He knows they eat away at him just as solemnly as he knows they will one day be his undoing.

V can feel that day approaching with breathtaking speed. He cherishes the moments he collects for himself. The checking up on Jumin. The chatting with Zen. The back-and-forth with Luciel. He tucks them away as though they were meant to be hidden, too, if only for his swelling sense of nostalgia.

He sees Rika speak with a bite, she has become sharp in all manners of the word. Saeran hangs deliberately at her side, begging for any sort of acknowledgement - that secret, too, will ruin him. He’ll see only hatred from his family once they realize everything he’d hid, everything he did. Everything he didn’t stop from happening.

And he’ll deserve nothing else.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

The day for retribution comes and V finds himself scrambling, despite himself.

Luciel says: _I don’t trust V anymore,_ and he feels it lodge at the back of his throat.

He offers no defenses - he has none, after all. He logs back into the RFA app later and gives everyone a farewell.

He tells them to just hate him and hopes they take his advice one last time.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Saeran swings the barrel towards V and it’s so messy, he almost thinks the bullet will miss.

Saeran says he’s ending it.

Maybe that’s for the best.

There’s the distinct sound of tearing, V feels brittle heat blooming in the center of his chest.

(He can’t see the tears, but he can feel the weight of them, the hitched breath, the sound of it pooling; he might almost gather it between his fingertips and press it at the hollows of his useless eyes. With that he could almost believe it, it might almost serve as a reminder: She cares. She loves him. She remains his.)

Some part of him knows what the gathering black is, the looming dark, the cessation of feeling. First it was all pain, now he strains to see the blurred outlines of Rika, her robes, some sort of glimpse of her face. Anything to take with him. V smiles. He tells her not to cry.

V had known his world would go completely soon, fade into stretches of blankness with undeniable finality; this, in a way, is really no different than he’d anticipated. He does not mind the letting go, now. He closes his eyes.

He thinks of Rika, and of the sun.


End file.
